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WIP of a portrait of a friend (previous iteration here)- think I'm going to put this on hold/abandon it at this point because I've stared at it so long I can't really see what I'm doing anymore, probably need to move on to something else so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. One thing's for sure though, he looks significantly more sinister here than he does in real life.

Nice paint bacon. Sinister is better.
Severed Head, I didn't think it was a fungus at first. Maybe rocks or embedded eggs or something. At a large scale, fungi have stalks and stuff, if those are supposed to be groups of small fungus seen from a far, there's usually a lot more fractal randomness and texture in stuff like that.
Here's what I'm picking away at. Man-faced birds just look better.

I've mostly been doing figure studies in my sketchbook, but I have managed to do a bit of work on Jackie Chan

Also Neil Gaiman

I haven't really focused on the neck and shoulder areas so much, I've just got them kind of roughed in there, I'm looking at a bunch of different light references and figure pics for what I'm going to do with that

EDIT: also here's a gif of the differences between Jackie Chan before and how it looks now:

I think it was loomis who advised artist to try to stay away from celebs for portrait drawing. You'll end up focussing too much on the likeness and too little on the drawing. Because as you see the parts of what you draw are pretty good, but the placement/ proportions knocks 'em down a notch sometimes.

Also, i'd have used a smaller brush on Gaiman's hair. Perhaps only try to draw the mass you see when you squint? check out Zapattack or Bacon's portraits above. There probably would be stray hairs everywhere (esp on the bird-dude), but those aren't really crucial for the drawing.

The way a character holds something is the main way we can perceive it's weight. The way she's holding the staff with only her left (our right) hand makes it seem like it's either made of foam or weighted heavy on the top (like a sledgehammer)

I'd curl her fingers on her right hand to give the staff some more weight. Something like this:

Go find a Stick and hold it as you'd hold the weapon. That always helps me

Hey Frank, you might want to consider pushing the colors on the girl a bit- your recent environments have shown a more bold sense of color usage than you have in the past, and it'd be nice to see it brought into your character work as well. Specifically, you tend to leave your skin tones fairly desaturated, when you could go for a richer warm tones would likely sell the complexion more. (This could be the result of usually working off a grey background.)

Quick paintover- tried to move skintone more yellow/orange, with more reds in the shadows, and moved the shirt to be a warmer tone of blue and more purple in the shadows. Also tried to make the hair less reliant on white highlights (which will cool colors of any color mixed with it) and more on straight lemon yellow, with red/orange shadows. These are pretty subtle changes, but a little variations in color temperature can make a big difference in overall effect.

Hey Frank, you might want to consider pushing the colors on the girl a bit- your recent environments have shown a more bold sense of color usage than you have in the past, and it'd be nice to see it brought into your character work as well. Specifically, you tend to leave your skin tones fairly desaturated, when you could go for a richer warm tones would likely sell the complexion more. (This could be the result of usually working off a grey background.)

Quick paintover- tried to move skintone more yellow/orange, with more reds in the shadows, and moved the shirt to be a warmer tone of blue and more purple in the shadows. Also tried to make the hair less reliant on white highlights (which will cool colors of any color mixed with it) and more on straight lemon yellow, with red/orange shadows. These are pretty subtle changes, but a little variations in color temperature can make a big difference in overall effect.